Short description:

This text and interactive CD-ROM help teachers extend their instructional practices through innovative approaches for teaching geometry as developed by the Open University's Centre for Mathematics Education.

Long description:

'Geometry is often given less time in the teaching timetable than other aspects of mathematics. This book encourages practitioners to think about and raise its profile, indeed achieving what its title suggest' - Primary Practice

`This creative, innovative and fascinating book/CD package is one you "MUST BUY". All prospective, new and experienced teachers of mathematics can use it to transform their teaching. All readers can use it to reignite their fascination with mathematics' - Professor Sylvia Johnson, Sheffield Hallam University

'This book exudes activity and interactivity. Moreover, it provides challenge in the context of a significant pedagogy, one that is not just present but actually made explicit. It is undoubtedly a book to learn geometry with, but also one to learn to think more deeply about geometry, about its nature and essence, and also about its teaching and learning' - David Pimm

Developing Thinking in Geometry enables teachers and their support staff to experience and teach geometric thinking. As well as discussing key teaching principles, the book and accompanying interactive CD include many activities that encourage readers to extend their own learning, and consequently their teaching practices.

The book is constructed around the following key themes:

- invariance;

- language and points of view;

- reasoning using invariance;

- visualising and representing.

These themes draw on teaching principles developed by the team at the Open University's Centre for Mathematics Education which has a 20-year track record of innovative approaches to teaching and learning geometry.

This is a 'must have' text for all primary mathematics specialists, secondary and Further Education mathematics teachers and their support staff. Anyone who wishes to create an understanding and enthusiasm for geometry based upon firm research and effective practice, will enjoy this book.

This is the course reader for the Open University Course ME627 Developing

Geometric Thinking

'Geometry is often given less time in the teaching timetable than other aspects of mathematics. This book encourages practitioners to think about and raise its profile, indeed achieving what its title suggest' - Primary Practice

`This creative, innovative and fascinating book/CD package is one you "MUST BUY". All prospective, new and experienced teachers of mathematics can use it to transform their teaching. All readers can use it to reignite their fascination with mathematics. This book fosters not only a curiosity about geometry itself but crucially focuses on how learners can actively engage in thinking about geometry and its central key ideas. Symbolically, the book/CD invites readers to engage actively with it, so that its very style embodies the approach to thinking about geometry that it advocates.

The structure of the book is helpful in supporting readers who want to dip into the book for a particular topic or theme and the authors have interspersed geometric, reflective and pedagogic activities woven into a rich interplay between the ideas themselves and ways in which teachers might facilitate learners' engagement with the ideas.

By making the focus of this book, thinking about geometry, the authors have highlighted the dimensions of geometric activity that enable us to engage. Throughout, the emphasis is on meaning making and the ways in which we visualize, represent, communicate and reason about geometric ideas. Images abound and the reader is encouraged to conceive geometry both dynamically and statically. Communication and meaning making are the essence of any learning and the authors have been very successful in conveying that message' - Professor Sylvia Johnson, Sheffield Hallam University